A better answer: in the course of a week, you will naturally spend time eating and not eating, moving and not moving, and sleeping and not sleeping. Calling something “fasting” (as opposed to “not eating right this second”), “excess exercise” (as opposed to “moving”), or “sleep deprivation” (as opposed to “being awake”) is begging the question. It assumes you know the correct balance and are describing a departure from that balance. Meanwhile, stubbing a toe is always a worse state than not having stubbed a toe. The correct amount of toe-stubbing is zero, we can assume any deviation is bad (but then argue about what is slow-motion assault and what is deeply useful trigger point massage therapy).
[The immune system is not a member of the “all things in balance” class. Having zero pathogens and being adapted to an environment with zero pathogens is obviously superior, but the trade-offs are made weird by being an adversarial game with lock-in]
My model is that the finding balance between eating/not-eating, moving/not-moving, and sleeping/not-sleeping, is not always trivial. Your body sends imperfect signals, the right answer varies based on the environment, which changes a lot, and you’re making trade-offs you might not endorse if you had more info. Mild-to-moderate departures from your current balance can be informative in helping you find the correct balance and learn the trade-offs you’re making, even if the experiment ends up being net negative in the short term
You might argue that Alexey specifically used the words “sleep deprivation”. I think that’s a poor phrasing resulting from a bad model being embedded in the language, but if he comes back and says “no, I definitely meant deprivation-as-in-bad-for-you”, it won’t change my belief in this model.
A better answer: in the course of a week, you will naturally spend time eating and not eating, moving and not moving, and sleeping and not sleeping. Calling something “fasting” (as opposed to “not eating right this second”), “excess exercise” (as opposed to “moving”), or “sleep deprivation” (as opposed to “being awake”) is begging the question. It assumes you know the correct balance and are describing a departure from that balance. Meanwhile, stubbing a toe is always a worse state than not having stubbed a toe.
There is something that is similar to eating, moving and sleeping in that respect: exhaling. Over the course of a minute, you will naturally spend time exhaling and not exhaling. The correct amount of time to spend not exhaling is not zero. And failing to exhale acutely stresses your body. But it doesn’t seem to follow from those things that holding your breath once in a while is beneficial.
In exercise, breathing, eating, and sleeping, we can perhaps roughly model the system as being driven by an oscillatory forcing function, with some amplitude and frequency, such as of the form Acos(w*t). The point is that although instinct, intuition, and imitation allow us to find parameters compatible with life/cognitive function/acceptable performance, we don’t have the data to determine whether or not these parameters are optimal, achievable, or sustainable, nor under what conditions this is or is not true.
We should carefully reserve the word “optimal” and “optimize” for situations where we have some sort of proof or evidence relative to the claim. It’s preferable to use words like “target” or “conventional” or “standard” when we’re discussing parameters that seem likely to work, or that have been shown to work, but that haven’t been clearly shown to be the best for our use case.
We know that a standard sleep length of 8 hours per day for adults is compatible with cognitive function, life, and health, but the argument we are all having here is over whether the evidence is sufficient to say that this is robustly optimal.
My point here is just that the argument “X-to-a-greater-than-usual-extent is an acute stress, and therefore it is good for health” (which was Guzey’s argument) is bad even if X is something we naturally do to a nonzero extent.
I’m probably about as uncertain as you are about whether sleeping 8 hours per night is optimal. (Though my comment was indeed unclear about that before I edited it, so thanks for pointing that out).
I think we should understand Guzey’s argument as a gesture in the direction of saying “we should try to establish the base rate for these sorts of stressors [i.e. purposeful behaviors with a normal range of variation in frequency and intensity]” He’s pointing out a few salient behaviors in this reference class (diet and exercise), pointing out that what we might call “sensible variation” is believed to be good for you, and then noting that sleep also belongs in this reference class. You’ve also noted that breathing belongs in this reference class, and we can also find extensive traditions of breath work that are at least meant to promote health.
I agree with others here that toe-stubbing and other injury does not belong in this reference class, because they aren’t purposeful behaviors.
A stronger counterargument is that we may be suffering from availability bias in identifying members of this reference class. We receive lots of messages to breath deep, get exercise, and eat less. What about sensory stimulation vs. lack of stimulation, emotional variation vs. calm, social contact vs. solitude, focus vs. distraction? Do we expect that there’s a “normal range” here that gives you health benefits with “sensible variation?” For example, do we think that people receive health benefits from periodic meditation retreats due to the unusual level of social isolation, calm, and lack of stimulation? Or that they receive health benefits from attending a music festival (sober), due to the unusual level of social contact, excitement, and sensory stimulation?
My uncertainty here is that I don’t know whether we’re restricting this to physical health, and also that I don’t feel confident on what health impacts these additional sorts of reference class members tend to have. intuitively, it seems good for you to get some variety in your life, but on the other hand, will going to the occasional rock concert really improve my heart health (any dancing I might do aside)?
I think that getting some evidence here would be beneficial. However, I also suspect that most of the research is on extremes (i.e. attending too many loud concerts is bad for your hearing), rather than on moving from “moderate” to “sensibly going a little above or below moderate for a while.”
But a few examples of “clearly good for you” in the reference class along with a bunch of examples of “not sure” still puts the valence of “sensible variation” for a member of this reference class as on average positive, though with not much more than 50% confidence.
On the other other hand, the evidence we do have about the impact of sleep on cognitive function is not encouraging. Anyway, the more I think about it, the less clarity I have on how to even think about this question. It doesn’t seem likely to result in a knock-down argument either way, no matter how much we might research it. Too fuzzy.
I think it’s useful to point out that training muscles for strength/size results in a well documented phenomenon called supercompensation. However, training for other qualities like speed doesn’t really work the same way. There’s lots of irrational training done because people make an inferential leap from the supercompensation they see in strength training and apply it to cases which intuitively seem like they might be analogues (e.g., weighted sprints don’t make you faster).
I think counterexamples are relevant because sometimes intuition points out real analogues, and sometimes fake ones, so we should value evidence and mechanistic explanation over analogies and cultural beliefs.
Sorry if this is a little incoherent, I wrote it when I was really sleepy.
I feel like there’s much stronger evidence that those things are beneficial than that acute sleep deprivation is. So it’s not clear to me how sleep deprivation is a lot more like those things than like stubbing your toe really hard.
My impression is that people who are used to sleep deprivation (new parents, military, shift workers) are not as impaired by it as people encountering the same level of deprivation for the first time- even when the former group is running on a prolonged sleep deficit, and the latter is going into sleep deprivation fully rested. You never stop being impaired, but past deprivation lets you cope with it better. This pattern matches to me with e.g. fasting will always make you dumb eventually, but people with fasting experience can go much longer before getting dumb.
I agree that this sort of adaptation probably occurs, but I don’t see how this makes sleep deprivation a lot more like those other things you mentioned than to stubbing your toe. Guzey also claimed that “[o]ccasional acute sleep deprivation is good for health,” not only that it promotes more efficient sleep, and for each of your examples of things that are more like sleep deprivation than toe-stubbing is (fasting, exercise, and infections in some cases) the claim does not seem to be that those things impair you but just less so with time.
(For that matter, I would guess that there is also some adaptation to stubbing your toe. It shouldn’t ever stop hurting or lightly and temporarily damaging you, but if you do it a lot you’ll probably find a way to cope with it better, and go back to doing work five minutes later rather than ten.)
This clearly isn’t fair. For one, the “really hard” modifier is completely made up (did Guzey ever imply that the way to train sleep deprivation resilience is to go “really hard” at not-sleeping rather than easing into it?), and for two, physical stress to ones toes is clearly a much more local thing than caloric or sleep deprivation so the hypothesis would be “kicking things in a controlled fashion strengthens the thing you’re impacting with”.
And I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but it’s definitely a thing that professional fighters do, and it does not at all strike me as “obviously false”.
Broadly, they train your body’s homeostasis mechanisms to handle a wider range of conditions, which lets it cope better with aging.
For the immune system in particular, it’s pretty well demonstrated that childhood disease load is setting expectations for future disease load.
Muscles are strengthened via tiny tears that heal. Tears are stress, too large tears are damage, but small tears are the only way to grow the muscle.
Fasting triggers some hormonal changes that maybe include some housecleaning and repair mechanisms, although I know less about this.
A better answer: in the course of a week, you will naturally spend time eating and not eating, moving and not moving, and sleeping and not sleeping. Calling something “fasting” (as opposed to “not eating right this second”), “excess exercise” (as opposed to “moving”), or “sleep deprivation” (as opposed to “being awake”) is begging the question. It assumes you know the correct balance and are describing a departure from that balance. Meanwhile, stubbing a toe is always a worse state than not having stubbed a toe. The correct amount of toe-stubbing is zero, we can assume any deviation is bad (but then argue about what is slow-motion assault and what is deeply useful trigger point massage therapy).
[The immune system is not a member of the “all things in balance” class. Having zero pathogens and being adapted to an environment with zero pathogens is obviously superior, but the trade-offs are made weird by being an adversarial game with lock-in]
My model is that the finding balance between eating/not-eating, moving/not-moving, and sleeping/not-sleeping, is not always trivial. Your body sends imperfect signals, the right answer varies based on the environment, which changes a lot, and you’re making trade-offs you might not endorse if you had more info. Mild-to-moderate departures from your current balance can be informative in helping you find the correct balance and learn the trade-offs you’re making, even if the experiment ends up being net negative in the short term
You might argue that Alexey specifically used the words “sleep deprivation”. I think that’s a poor phrasing resulting from a bad model being embedded in the language, but if he comes back and says “no, I definitely meant deprivation-as-in-bad-for-you”, it won’t change my belief in this model.
There is something that is similar to eating, moving and sleeping in that respect: exhaling. Over the course of a minute, you will naturally spend time exhaling and not exhaling. The correct amount of time to spend not exhaling is not zero. And failing to exhale acutely stresses your body. But it doesn’t seem to follow from those things that holding your breath once in a while is beneficial.
In exercise, breathing, eating, and sleeping, we can perhaps roughly model the system as being driven by an oscillatory forcing function, with some amplitude and frequency, such as of the form Acos(w*t). The point is that although instinct, intuition, and imitation allow us to find parameters compatible with life/cognitive function/acceptable performance, we don’t have the data to determine whether or not these parameters are optimal, achievable, or sustainable, nor under what conditions this is or is not true.
We should carefully reserve the word “optimal” and “optimize” for situations where we have some sort of proof or evidence relative to the claim. It’s preferable to use words like “target” or “conventional” or “standard” when we’re discussing parameters that seem likely to work, or that have been shown to work, but that haven’t been clearly shown to be the best for our use case.
We know that a standard sleep length of 8 hours per day for adults is compatible with cognitive function, life, and health, but the argument we are all having here is over whether the evidence is sufficient to say that this is robustly optimal.
My point here is just that the argument “X-to-a-greater-than-usual-extent is an acute stress, and therefore it is good for health” (which was Guzey’s argument) is bad even if X is something we naturally do to a nonzero extent.
I’m probably about as uncertain as you are about whether sleeping 8 hours per night is optimal. (Though my comment was indeed unclear about that before I edited it, so thanks for pointing that out).
I think we should understand Guzey’s argument as a gesture in the direction of saying “we should try to establish the base rate for these sorts of stressors [i.e. purposeful behaviors with a normal range of variation in frequency and intensity]” He’s pointing out a few salient behaviors in this reference class (diet and exercise), pointing out that what we might call “sensible variation” is believed to be good for you, and then noting that sleep also belongs in this reference class. You’ve also noted that breathing belongs in this reference class, and we can also find extensive traditions of breath work that are at least meant to promote health.
I agree with others here that toe-stubbing and other injury does not belong in this reference class, because they aren’t purposeful behaviors.
A stronger counterargument is that we may be suffering from availability bias in identifying members of this reference class. We receive lots of messages to breath deep, get exercise, and eat less. What about sensory stimulation vs. lack of stimulation, emotional variation vs. calm, social contact vs. solitude, focus vs. distraction? Do we expect that there’s a “normal range” here that gives you health benefits with “sensible variation?” For example, do we think that people receive health benefits from periodic meditation retreats due to the unusual level of social isolation, calm, and lack of stimulation? Or that they receive health benefits from attending a music festival (sober), due to the unusual level of social contact, excitement, and sensory stimulation?
My uncertainty here is that I don’t know whether we’re restricting this to physical health, and also that I don’t feel confident on what health impacts these additional sorts of reference class members tend to have. intuitively, it seems good for you to get some variety in your life, but on the other hand, will going to the occasional rock concert really improve my heart health (any dancing I might do aside)?
I think that getting some evidence here would be beneficial. However, I also suspect that most of the research is on extremes (i.e. attending too many loud concerts is bad for your hearing), rather than on moving from “moderate” to “sensibly going a little above or below moderate for a while.”
But a few examples of “clearly good for you” in the reference class along with a bunch of examples of “not sure” still puts the valence of “sensible variation” for a member of this reference class as on average positive, though with not much more than 50% confidence.
On the other other hand, the evidence we do have about the impact of sleep on cognitive function is not encouraging. Anyway, the more I think about it, the less clarity I have on how to even think about this question. It doesn’t seem likely to result in a knock-down argument either way, no matter how much we might research it. Too fuzzy.
I think it’s useful to point out that training muscles for strength/size results in a well documented phenomenon called supercompensation. However, training for other qualities like speed doesn’t really work the same way. There’s lots of irrational training done because people make an inferential leap from the supercompensation they see in strength training and apply it to cases which intuitively seem like they might be analogues (e.g., weighted sprints don’t make you faster).
I think counterexamples are relevant because sometimes intuition points out real analogues, and sometimes fake ones, so we should value evidence and mechanistic explanation over analogies and cultural beliefs.
Sorry if this is a little incoherent, I wrote it when I was really sleepy.
I feel like there’s much stronger evidence that those things are beneficial than that acute sleep deprivation is. So it’s not clear to me how sleep deprivation is a lot more like those things than like stubbing your toe really hard.
My impression is that people who are used to sleep deprivation (new parents, military, shift workers) are not as impaired by it as people encountering the same level of deprivation for the first time- even when the former group is running on a prolonged sleep deficit, and the latter is going into sleep deprivation fully rested. You never stop being impaired, but past deprivation lets you cope with it better. This pattern matches to me with e.g. fasting will always make you dumb eventually, but people with fasting experience can go much longer before getting dumb.
I agree that this sort of adaptation probably occurs, but I don’t see how this makes sleep deprivation a lot more like those other things you mentioned than to stubbing your toe. Guzey also claimed that “[o]ccasional acute sleep deprivation is good for health,” not only that it promotes more efficient sleep, and for each of your examples of things that are more like sleep deprivation than toe-stubbing is (fasting, exercise, and infections in some cases) the claim does not seem to be that those things impair you but just less so with time.
(For that matter, I would guess that there is also some adaptation to stubbing your toe. It shouldn’t ever stop hurting or lightly and temporarily damaging you, but if you do it a lot you’ll probably find a way to cope with it better, and go back to doing work five minutes later rather than ten.)
you’re right, it’s not quite analogous. I still low-confidence believe in the homeostasis disruption thing, but this isn’t evidence of that.
This clearly isn’t fair. For one, the “really hard” modifier is completely made up (did Guzey ever imply that the way to train sleep deprivation resilience is to go “really hard” at not-sleeping rather than easing into it?), and for two, physical stress to ones toes is clearly a much more local thing than caloric or sleep deprivation so the hypothesis would be “kicking things in a controlled fashion strengthens the thing you’re impacting with”.
And I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but it’s definitely a thing that professional fighters do, and it does not at all strike me as “obviously false”.